The Culture Crossover Series

Culture Crossover is Techworld's weekly mashup of tech and creativity: a series that highlights examples of projects, exhibitions and events that delightfully bridge the worlds of technology and culture.

This year at the BFI's annual London Film Festival, a selection of short films focus on the disruption – in the parlance of the technology entrepreneurs spurning it along – of the fabric of everything.

As part of London Design Festival 2019, software company SAP has commissioned an installation at the V&A to raise awareness around the issue of ocean plastics. We interview Sam Jacob of Sam Jacob Studio to learn more. See also: Sony's European Design Centre director Philip Rose talks us through the chaos of the firm's sensor-driven double pendulum installation.

Technology seems to mediate everything we do, consume, and are. So it is little wonder that after the strong showing from last year, another tranche of films at the BFI's London Film Festival have science and technology as central themes, along with the related mystery, fatigue, and ethics that many of us are only just beginning to grapple with.

Researchers from Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea can predict a film's success by applying deep learning models to its plot summaries. Does the growing influence of algorithms in filmmaking challenge human creativity?

A film based on the cold war sci-fi classic by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson, about a spaceship of refugees fleeing a doomed earth, holds up a bleak mirror to the way world events seems to be headed. Techworld speaks with directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja to learn more.

The Great Hack could be another bleak episode of Netflix’s techno-dystopian horror series Black Mirror. A seedy analytics company weaponises millions of data points extracted from unwitting social media users, only to manipulate their political worldviews en masse, foment intercultural conflicts, and, ultimately, usher in an authoritarian leadership. Unfortunately The Great Hack is a documentary.

Competing algorithms from the likes of Bumble, Hinge and OkCupid all attempt to answer one question: can computers crack the compatibility code? In Osmosis, Netflix's new French language series set in the not-too-distant future, Osmosis believe their technology holds the answer.

Techworld spoke to Michael Takeo Magruder, the artist behind Imaginary Cities, an exhibition at the British Library that transforms digitised archives of 19th Century cityscapes into glittering, shifting and evolving artworks built on top of complex technological foundations.

World famous beatboxer and visual artist Harry Yeff, AKA Reeps One has released a film, We Speak Music, that charts the relationship between people and technology through the lens of the human voice. Techworld chats to Yeff about the role of the artist in the modern age and what it's like to beatbox with your digital twin.

William Basinski sampled the sound of two back holes colliding on his latest album, but isn't space silent? We journey billions of years through the space time continuum to give you a potted history of the siren song of a black hole.

A film directed by Clay Jeter and sponsored by Lexus seeks to place the extreme craftsmanship of Japan's 'takumi' in the modern era, raising questions about narrative, and work, in the age of automation

Dear Datais a project that took on one central question: Can you get to know someone simply from their data? Each week, two information designers plucked a behavioural or experiential metric from their lives, measured it, and highlighted the results in infographics tiny and ornate enough to fit on the front of a postcard.

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